All actors, when they first get their hands on the script they’ll be performing, do the same thing. They scan through the pages to see how many lines they have.

Often this results in disappointment, because they feel the role isn’t big enough. But Vanessa Rubin had a very different reaction two years ago when director Woodie King Jr. sent her the script to Reenie Upchurch’s “Yesterdays.”

“Woodie told me he wanted me for Billie Holiday,” she says. “But with a title like ‘Yesterdays,’ I thought the show was going to have a lot of actors in it playing famous people. So I started skimming through the pages and saw there weren’t any other people in the show. It was going to be just me onstage all night long. I called up Woodie and said, ‘You gotta be kiddin’ me!’ ”

King wasn’t. He’d come to know Rubin about 25 years ago when she was dating his musical director at the Henry Street Settlement in New York and was singing jazz here and there. He liked her voice and her renditions, and said he’d like to use her in a show someday.

It took a while, but in 2009 Rubin started portraying Holiday. She took the show — set in a nightclub, and taking place near the end of the jazz icon’s life — to Hartford Stage in Connecticut, the Black Rep of St. Louis and the National Black Theatre in New York. Starting on Thursday, she’ll bring it to Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, though it won’t quite be a one-woman show: three musicians (pianist Levi Barcourt, drummer Bernard Davis and bassist David Jackson) will back her and occasionally interact with her.

The Cleveland native had a love of music early on, although she says that growing up as the seventh of eight children didn’t make that easy.

“I didn’t have much jurisdiction over the Admiral hi-fi,” she says. So she listened to her father’s records of the big band era and the calypso discs that her mother, a Trinidadian, had.

Along the way, she developed an interest in jazz. “And just once, for a lark, I entered a beauty contest,” she says. “I didn’t have much money, so I bought a new dress, kept the tag in so I could bring it back after the contest, and did my song.”

It was a harbinger, for Rubin sang “God Bless the Child,” one of Holiday’s signature hits. She finished as a runner-up, but won Miss Congeniality and the talent award in this Miss Black Central Ohio contest.

“For the first time, it really did cross my mind that I might be able to do this for a living,” she says. “But I still took the dress back the next day.”

Her parents were pushing her toward law or medical school, but Rubin became a journalism major and graduated from Ohio State University. She subsequently worked in public relations and real estate and, after she moved to New York in 1982, spent 10 years as an English teacher in public schools. Singing was something she did only occasionally.

“Then,” she says, with a sigh, “I joined a program that would get me hired by the Youth Commission in the Civil Service. I just didn’t get along with the person in charge, and lost out on the position.

“And that,” she says, with a definitive nod, “is when, out of anger and determination, I decided I was going to do what I really wanted to do. Art truly does express the human condition.”